


Old Flames Licking the Clouds

by timelyutterances



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Disability, Flashbacks, Illness, Lycanthrophy, Lycanthropy as Chronic Illness, M/M, The Prank, sort of lie-low-at-Lupins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28064244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timelyutterances/pseuds/timelyutterances
Summary: When Sirius returns to Remus during Goblet of Fire, old wounds are re-opened, some of which were never closed. A study of Remus Lupin, his life, his love, and his disability.Featuring a parakeet named Faiz.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Kudos: 25





	Old Flames Licking the Clouds

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a bit of a character study, but taking into mind specifically the treatment of Remus’s disability by those closest to him. The story is set in the early Goblet of Fire era, very canon compliant, and has several flashbacks.
> 
> Plus - Sirius is explicitly described as British South Asian in this fic.

**1994**

“This is quite, uh, unorthodox. Not unwelcome, per se, but certainly unorthodox.” Remus frowns at Sirius’s presence on his doorstep. His hair was short and curling down to the nape of his neck, he was tanned to a deep mahogany, and on his shoulder sat a very large, very green parakeet. 

“You’re right, he _is_ a bit of a thesaurus, this one.” Remus jumps as the parakeet spoke in a very gravelly and almost definitely South Asian accent. “Well, at least he’s pretty if not a little ragged around the edges.”

Sirius winks and grins, pushing past Remus to enter the small house he hadn’t seen in years. He looks around before enveloping Remus in a bear hug, the poor bird struggling to extricate itself from the overenthusiastic reunion. 

“Sorry about the bird.” Sirius shrugs the parakeet off his shoulder. “And the other bird.” 

Buckbeak taps his extraordinarily large head against the window indignantly, seemingly taking some kind of offence to being called a bird, being compared to _that_ little fiend, _and_ being left outside. 

“You weren’t followed, I hope?” Remus scratches his head, warily observing the parakeet sticking its head in his sugar bowl. “Not that you aren’t welcome, Sirius love, but why are you on my doorstep looking as though you just got off your post-Hogwarts grand tour? And yes, I mean the bird.”

“Well, I was going to fly north in a few weeks, up to Harry. You’ve heard of the tournament, I’m sure. I want to keep an eye on it.” Sirius stretches his legs out on Remus’ threadbare sofa and grins, winking roguishly. “You were but on the way, love. Couldn’t help but make a little stop to rest my little legs, what with being a desperate fugitive and all that.”

“Sirius.” Remus closes his eyes as he sits down on the armchair opposite. He gnaws his thumb in a clumsy attempt to keep his hands looking clean and to stop himself yelling at Sirius’s continued recklessness, but only succeeded in ripping some skin off a hangnail. “Sirius. I live just outside Cardiff. Ten minutes from me are the bloody valleys. Scotland is in no way close to this, even if you were taking Muggle trains. We are currently in _Wales_. In what bloody world is that “on the way” to Scotland?” 

“I would have preferred an _oh Sirius, it’s so delightful to see you, you are as handsome as ever.”_ Sirius kicks his shoes off. 

“Right, let’s pretend I already said that. Now, could I ask what’s with the birds or will you tell me they’re a present for Harry?”

The green parakeet alights onto Remus’s head, causing the Welshman to jump in surprise at avian antics for the second time that day.

“You know, I’m in a dangerous position here. One strain, one plop, and you’ll stop calling me _the bird_.” The parakeet threatened, before biting him on the ear and flying back to the sugar bowl. “It’s Faiz to you. Named after Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the poet. Keep the name in your mouth, you pretentious little white boy.” 

“Sirius, why do you have a talking _fucking_ bird?” Remus hisses. “Why is your bird calling me a white boy? Why is said bird named after a subcontinental poet? Why is it in _my house_?” 

“Well,” Sirius sits up and looks rather sheepish for the first time, which was saying something considering he’d just walked in unannounced with two birds and a suitcase. “I needed something to send letters, owls are monitored, and Faiz belonged to my Uncle Alphard.”

“The weird one.”

“Yes, the one who refused to wear anything except a lacy shawl towards the end of his life. Anyway, Faiz belongs to him, Buckbeak helps me get around, and I, darling, missed you to my very bones. And Remus, you _are_ a pretentious white boy; for all Faiz’s faults, he isn’t often wrong.” 

“You have been inside my house for ten minutes and you’ve already started, have you? Right, I take it you’ll help with dinner?”

Remus stands up and both his legs stung for a sudden, tired moment -he forgot it was the full moon two days ago, and that his muscles were running themselves ragged after tearing apart and rebuilding. He clatters to the floor unglamorously, his cheeks staining a deep red. He tries to push himself up. The stumble, so simple, is starting to put him in a dark mood, one he slips into quite often, yet he does not expect Sirius to remember it. 

“I won’t help with dinner.” Sirius is beside him all of a sudden, his long dark hands on Remus’s white, strained fingers. “I’ll make it myself.” 

“I should be hosting you.” Remus glances up at Sirius, his tone suddenly desperate. “You _are_ here for a few weeks, then? You won’t leave? You won’t go away without a word, then?”

Questions like these absolutely gut Sirius - specifically because he doesn’t understand. This whole thing had always confused him and broke his heart simultaneously. It was very quiet. He takes one of Remus’s hands in his and looks at him properly for the first time in thirteen years. He was still _Remus_ of course, handsome in his _pretentious white man_ way, but the hair swept back from his forehead was lightening into streaks of grey and his eyes were outlined with faint grooves. He is all ribs and sinew, cheeks almost hollow. Sirius feels the balance between them shift, a little. 

“It takes its toll.” Remus explains, looking away. “It always did.”

-

**1967**

A seven year old should not only know pain. One of the things Remus knows about himself (a creature about whom he knows so strangely little), is that life was distinctly unfair. Not through anything he had done (he knows this, because Da was adamant that Remus had _never_ done anything wrong) but because the world could not fall neatly into lines for him like it did for everyone else. 

“What if I went to school like the Muggle children?” Remus asked Hope plaintively. She kissed his forehead (and his honey-brown hair so, so like hers) and wondered if she was spoiling her son by taking him on her lap at the grand old age of seven. She decided that you cannot spoil someone who has known such pain so soon, and took him on her knee, arms enclosing his prickly beige jumper. 

“You know I don’t like that word, Remus. _Muggle_ … it sounds so funny. As if we aren’t people trying to get along as best as we can. Words are not just words, my love.” Hope sighed as her husband clattered in, kicking off his heavy work boots and travelling cloak. “Lyall for the love of Christ, do _not_ get mud on the carpet ten minutes after I vacuumed it.”

“But _school_ ?” Remus insisted, wriggling out of his mum’s grasp to face her and frown like a little old man (he was so thin and pale, though Hope, spots of colour high in his cheek like a consumptive patient). “Can’t I go to _school_ if I can’t go to Hogwarts?” 

Hope cannot really picture her baby boy in school. Boys were so rough, so wild, so… She looked at her husband trying to brush away the mud on the carpet, only succeeding in getting it everywhere. Remus was not like that, he was all soft-skin and books and sitting on laps. Most importantly, she cannot place his illness in a _normal_ school, where would he go every month, what would they tease him about, what would they think of him? His lilting Welsh accent in the deep Cornish countryside would make him enough of a target, let alone the fact he was a…

“Mum…” Remus murmured. “Please let me go? Just in this town? When we move again, I won’t ask. I promise. I promise, please?”

Lyall finally understood the gist of the conversation and turned around, guilt furrowing his eyebrows downwards - he looked like a man caught out in a crime, silly and desperate and ashamed. He cannot answer his son - he could never answer his son, because how do you tell a seven year old he could not survive in a world built to shut him out?

“I’m so sorry, boy.” Lyall bit the words out. “I really am.”

Remus turned into his mothers lap, burying his face in her shoulder. He knows that when his father got in this mood - guilty and heavy, he did not feel like he could ask for anything. 

A seven year old should not shoulder an adult’s guilt. But Lyall didn’t know where to put his burdensome feeling of responsibility, and unknowingly Remus placed it on his own back, right above the jagged half-circle that never seemed to heal. 

(Hope knew that words were not just words. She wished her husband had known that too, two years ago, holding a bleeding child in his arms.)

-

**1980**

“Da, you have to tell me.” Remus is just as inquisitive as when he was a child, but his voice was harsher, more insistent. Less likely to bury his face in his mother’s skirts and turn pink. Lyall realised that the baby boy they ushered around the country trying to protect had grown into a six foot tall man. With stubble, and spider-fingered hands, and broad shoulders that Lyall ensured he would carry the weight of the world with. With a boyfriend.

(Lyall could not be prejudiced. Any notion of prejudice had run out of him the moment he spat venom at a werewolf on trial, and said werewolf had bit his son. It was penance then, that Lyall could never, would never - be prejudiced against anything his son did.)

“Da.” Remus sat heavily on the sofa. “I’ve graduated. I’m looking for jobs. And I need to register as a werewolf again, and I need to tell them the circumstances of the bite myself and I cannot look bloody Umbridge in her beady eyes and tell her I don’t know a thing.”

The fire burns a deep red as it burns down. Hope watched it from the bedroom - she would stoke it, or stoke her husband so he stopped being so stolid and unmoving. But this was his story to tell, it was his guilt to unload. 

“You know it was my fault.” Lyall said suddenly, turning to Remus. Remus realised he hadn’t heard this ragged, guilty tone for years. He had been listening for it through his life, tiptoeing around his illness so that his father didn’t have to sound as if the world was tearing its way through his throat. 

“Greyback, you know of him I’m sure.” Lyall breathed out. “He was on trial, and I was there - the Ministry would not believe he was a werewolf. I told them he was. I insisted on it.”

Go on, Hope urged silently. Tell him everything. 

“So it was revenge, then?” Remus’s voice shook slightly. “That’s all it took?”

“No.” Lyall was grasping at his corduroy clad knees, fingers twisting in the fabric. He looked as if he were the one on trial, but Remus did not know what it meant. Until - 

“I told him he was vermin.” The older man said in a sharp exhale. “I told him he was filth, and that he did not belong in polite society. That the ministry was making all these arrangements for werewolves to live in society, when they didn’t deserve to live at all. I said they were all vermin and deserved to be locked up, I told him that they were all evil, that they all deserved to die. I made myself arbitrator and I passed judgement, and he - he took his revenge on you.” 

Remus stared at him blankly, his eyes dark in the lack of light. 

“Oh Remus, since then -“ 

“Ly.” Hope stepped out into sharp relief, silhouetted against the dying fire. “Ly, don’t tell him that _ever since your son became one_ , your prejudice evaporated. That much he knows. Don’t make him forgive you now. Don’t put that on him. He knows you love him, but my love -“

She walked over and sat on the sofa beside Remus. He looked so tall, so adult - she didn’t want to touch him. 

“Don’t make him forgive you.” 

Lyall nodded and rose. It was too dark now for his face to be seen - all three of them were relieved about that. 

“I.. I left something at work I had to finish.” He muttered, his hands shaking as he did up his muddy boots. “I’ll be back soon - I - “

“I won’t tell you that he feels bad.” Hope whispered as her husband stumbled out into the night. She was frightened of how her adult son would react. Whether this would split them up. Or whether Remus would internalise it as he had done everything else and suffer in silence. 

“I know he feels bad.” Remus choked out. “I’ve known that since the bite. Mum -“ 

Hope Lupin felt her son lay down and place his head on her skirts as he had done as a boy. 

“You shouldn’t have known.” Hope whispered, starting to stroke his hair down to his shoulders. “No child should know that their father spent half his life wanting to place a sword between his eyes because of his own guilt. He should not have put that on you. I begged him, Remus, not to be so guilty, so in pain every time he saw you. He was so afraid and so silent. But he understood that words, _muggle_ , _werewolf_ , _mud blood, half blood_ \- they aren’t just words. I tried to teach you that too.”

“I felt like it was my fault he felt so - all my life, I thought it was me.” Remus murmured, muffled in his mother’s lap. “He made me feel like his sadness was mine.”

“I love you.” Hope had always known how Remus had felt responsible. How the boy woke up in St. Mungo’s, in tremendous pain, watching his father collapse to the floor the minute he opened his eyes. How must he have lived with that? How was he standing?

“I love you, Remus. Your father does too. I will not make excuses, I will not tell you he is sorry for behaving so.” She kissed his soft brown hair, feeling like she had ten years ago - not wanting to let him out into the world. Feeling like the cruel world, so clearly not built for him to survive would only bring him back to her lap. She realised that she did not want him there, like she had longed for so many years, because it broke her heart. 

(Love could hurt. Lyall’s love for Remus, his guilt at his _illness_ \- hurt his son as though it were a constant wound through his childhood. Lyall’s love was still love, he was not an evil man or even a particularly bad father. But his love hurt.)

1994

“What the hell is this meant to be?” Remus questioned the concoction on his plate, poking at it with a weary fork. Sirius had been living at Remus’s house for just over a week, and every day led to him having some culinary meltdown. Remus allowed it - of course you would allow a man who lived off bread and gruel for thirteen years to have some fun with coriander. 

But.

“Why is it… green?” 

“Well,” Sirius shrugged, shovelling a spoonful into his mouth. “It started out as having meant to be a curry. I’m not awfully sure what the hell it is now.”

“Well,” Remus tasted a piece of chicken gingerly. “It tastes good, even though it looks a bit like your disembowelled Hippogriff.”

“Of course it’s good. It’s Indian.” Faiz quipped, dipping his beak into Remus’s plate and fixing a beady eye on him.

“You’re Pakistani, love.” Sirius corrected the bird. “Not the same.”

“I still genuinely cannot understand why you brought over a family heirloom from your one certifiably insane family member. Secondly, I really don’t understand why the fuck said family heirloom is a bird which thinks it’s people.” 

“That’s what the colonisers said.” Faiz muttered darkly, wiping his beak on Remus’s shirtsleeve before flying to some dark corner of the room. 

“I will cook you, chicken.”

“That’s what they said too!” 

“Remus, for the love of god, don’t antagonise fucking Faiz because the last time Dumbledore tried to ask him a question he called him the geriatric version of Oswald Mosley.” 

“In some ways, your stupid bird isn’t wrong.” 

It was quiet again, in the immediate aftermath of Faiz-induced hilarity. The flames in Remus’s pokey fireplace gasped and breathed until they didn’t. Sirius cleared away the plates and helped Remus to the armchair, sitting opposite him on the sofa. Things had never been so awkward between them before. They had touched hands, sat close by, but not since that stolen kiss right after Sirius’s escape from Hogwarts had they been intimate. Remus does not know whose fault it is. He aches for someone to blame. 

“When I was on my way here,” Sirius started slowly, stumbling over some of his consonants. “I noticed that you didn’t have your shed thing any more. Where you used to transform. Was it blown over or something?”

“It wasn’t that it blew away, no.” Remus smiled bitterly, carving a dimple into his cheek that Sirius almost forgot existed. “It was that I burnt it down. Since then, I transformed in the Ministry cells, and after the Wolfsbane potion… just here.”

“Burnt it down?” Sirius queried gently. “What do you mean?”

“After Da passed on, just two years after - well. All of that. I burnt it down. The shed burnt right into the dirt, and I stood there watching and the flames ate the sky. It was the first time in two years I’d felt, well, anything.”

“But why?” The image brings a lump to Sirius’s throat. Of thin, pale Remus coughing in the smoke, looking painfully young, his hands burnt from controlling the flames. He slid down the sofa onto the floor, putting his arms around Remus’s knees. He whispered something along the lines of an apology to those knees, and prayed Remus didn’t hear. 

“Because I hated it.” Remus’s smile twisted further, and his hand threaded itself in the other man’s hair. “Not the shed itself, but the concept of sheds. Of having to hide away. Of having to not think about it, to not tell anyone. To live on the margins and be grateful for it. Oh Sirius - I’ve been so full of hate.”

“You deserve to hate.” Sirius’s voice shook slightly, as something clicked in his mind. From seventeen years ago when they were just sixteen. “God, Remus, you deserve to hate more than anyone.” 

Sirius cleared his throat and glanced up, to see Remus looking at him with concern. 

“Do you think if I’d ——“

The sentence catches in his throat. Suddenly the days of Walburga standing over him with a birch rod, mocking him and whipping him by turns threatens to overwhelm him. The words didn’t come, but Remus didn’t expect them. Instead, the werewolf bent down in his chair and kissed Sirius longingly, slowly, in the room that smelt of new smoke and kitchen disasters. He placed his hands on Sirius’s face and kissed him again and again, trying to convey that the words didn’t need to come. 

Above them, looming over thin white walls, the sky stays dark and flickering, as though with the memory of old flames licking the clouds.

**1973**

“You don’t. Just pretend you don’t know. Please.” Remus begged. 

He knows his friends are attempting to be sweet but they stood facing him three against one, all _knowing_ the secret that ached all the time. He wished that Sirius would put his hands back in his pockets and stroll away, that James and Peter would shrug and go back to their card game. Wished that this secret would just lie horribly mangled and hurting, but mercifully quiet under their beds. But these boys, so well meaning, dragged the illness out and shook it in front of him - excited to show off their knowledge of it, their progressiveness at ignoring it. Remus felt so cornered and the secret was so heavy in his throat. 

“We won’t tell.” James sounded uncharacteristically serious. “But we have a _plan_ , Remus.”

A plan. Remus sits heavily down on his bed, praying that they would not make it a game. 

“We’ll become animals.” 

“Sorry, you’ll do _what_ ?” Remus took a minute to process what James said so mathematically. Remus isn’t thinking about this in any sort of academic sense but frankly, he does not understand why any living thing would ever choose to not have two legs and _sentience_. 

“If we were to become Animagi,” Sirius continues for James, looking intently at Remus’ reaction. “If we were to become animals - it would be easier for you. That’s what we want to try, Remus. It would be easier for you - you won’t… hurt. That’s - that’s why wolves roam in packs.”

“I hate the word packs.” Remus hissed. “I hate it. Words aren’t just words.”

“Words aside, Remus, it would be easier. I swear it isn’t a game, it isn’t a prank -“ James’ glasses flashed in the dusk (and this was how Remus remembered him decades on - intent on doing some good in the world, his hands clasped together. Only thirteen years old and _so_ earnest.). “But only if you want us to.”

Remus had never been asked for consent in his life and when the option was provided to him - it stuck between his lungs, lodging there like a warm fist he could not speak around. 

“It would be easier,” he nodded slowly. He didn’t know how he would ever thank them, but they were boys, he couldn’t throw himself on them. “It would be a lot easier, yes. I… I _would_ like you to try. If - that was what you wanted as well.” 

“I think we deserve snacks while we brainstorm,” Peter decides, bending over to rummage through Remus’ secret stock (another secret that apparently wasn’t). 

“You don’t need to brainstorm, Pete. Burrowing like that, you’re going to be a rat, mate.” Sirius quips, and the ensuing laughter keeps them firmly on the ground. 

(It did get easier. Because his friends made the world bend for Remus, instead of Remus bending for the world. This was something he would never forget, because Remus had the mulish sense of gratefulness that only comes from the deepest inferiority complexes.)

**1976**

“I apologised. I apologised a thousand times over, Remus, and I don’t bloody understand what you want me to _do_ now.” Sirius shrugged wildly, his hair falling across his face. “I understand wanting to break up, Remus, I really do. Or if you want to take a break. But you _cannot_ ruin our friendship over… this.”

Remus turned on him, eyes flashing, vicious and uncaged. 

“My love, my darling, what the _fuck_ do you think _this_ is?” 

“I-I——-“ Sirius swallowed. “It was me telling Snivellus. It was me breaking your trust, which you put into me. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No.” Remus sat heavily on his four poster bed. “Do you think me breaking up with you, or _ruining this friendship_ is appropriate penance for what you did, Sirius?” 

“please -“ Sirius bit his lip, looking suddenly frightened. Even in fear he was beautiful, Remus thought angrily. Sirius knew he was beautiful - Pakistani features and the wizarding aristocracy mannerisms that he could not shake off with his dreadful fake Cockney approximation. Remus knew Sirius knew - that there was beauty, and then there was Sirius. 

“—--“ Sirius was breathless, voice catching and stumbling over the words. There was a beating at the end of every whimper for him as a child. He must not. Not now. 

“My love, imagine if you had a room.” Remus closed his eyes as Sirius sat next to him, still hyperventilating from an oxygen rush. “And in that room you could be yourself as much as you wanted. And nobody would say anything. And you wouldn’t have to say anything if you didn’t want, and you sure as hell wouldn’t have to cover it up.”

“And then -“ Remus continued, as if talking to a child. “And then someone lets people in. And the beauty of that room; not that it _cured_ you but that it let you get by, all that vanishes the minute the first person enters. And judges you.” 

“Forgive me.” Sirius’s voice hardened, but Remus knew it was not a demand, but a plea. Remus thought back to the moment he found out that it was Sirius who had let the truth of his illness slip. When he shoved his lover away from him and said all he wanted was to die mercifully and _would Sirius do that for him_ , which seemed to stun all four of them into silence. James, for once, succumbed to tears (he was overtired, he argued later, from staying up all night). Remus felt white hot rage and shame run parallel through his body. He could not forget that feeling. Even now, it fuelled him.

“It can’t be the same.” Remus leaned forward and kissed the other boy on the mouth. Selfishly, he places a finger on Sirius’s lips when he made to apologise again - this transgression was okay, under the circumstances. He 

“It _can’t_ be the same.” Remus closed his eyes and breathed for a minute. It frightened Sirius, this reaction, this stillness. This is how Remus would look if he was dead, the macabre thought crossed Sirius’s mind and he shuddered. 

“It isn’t a joke for me.” Remus said flatly, finally. “It never was. You have always loved me for how much I hated myself - yet questioned why I did so. This is why, Sirius.”

When he opened his eyes again, Sirius was too close for friendship, his eyes trailing tears. It is quiet around them. It is dangerous. Sirius’s curling black hair fell around both their faces as the other boy leaned over him, enviously beautiful. Remus does not know what came over him as he placed his hand on Sirius’s cheek, the colours clashing and contrasting. 

So Sirius kissed him again like he had before, but differently. 

(Remus, from that year on, second-guessed everything Sirius did for him. It _had_ to be a joke, it _had_ to be a prank. It confused Sirius, and hurt him no small amount, to be thought of as such. But he understood, nearly two decades later.)

And then he would - 

**1994**

“Apologise. I have to apologise.” Sirius’s voice broke as he stood again on the threshold of Remus’s cottage, the Welsh wind biting into the back of his neck. 

(The parakeet refused to leave the house at all, firmly telling Sirius that he could use “the overgrown one” for letters and that he, Faiz, was “not built for such climates and it would be utterly disrespectful to dear Darayas Alphard Black and his bedazzled dupatta if his beloved parakeet were to _freeze_.” So they left him with Remus, where he spent the morning of Sirius’s department judging Remus’s flamboyant book collection.)

“For overstaying your welcome?” Remus smiled, scratching the back of his head. “I’d complain, if I weren’t in love with you.”

“No, Remus - I _have_ to apologise.” Sirius’s voice is dark and starting to waver. “Don’t talk o-over me. Just let me say this.”

He took a breath, watching Remus’s face pale and hands drop to his sides. 

“For telling Snape. That time —— seventeen years ago. It’s the worst thing I have ever done. I didn’t see it then. How much it curled up against our relationship, between us. How awful I was to you.”

Remus closed his eyes, and smiled. _Finally_ , he thinks. _Finally_. 

“Every day for the last two weeks I was - I was thinking. Would it have been different had I not done that to you? We both know the answer is -that it would have. That I did not just break your trust but disrespected you. That I made you believe I, like everyone else, skirted around it, called it _furry little problems_ and conditions and could never say it by its name. And I am so sorry. I should have sp-spent my life being sorry.”

Remus tentatively waited until he knew Sirius was finished before speaking. 

_It’s all right_. 

And finally, he meant it. Sirius looks at him once more, a hard, hungry look that refused to kiss him (“because I _will_ see you again, _mera Jaan,_ I will see you again so soon”) before spinning around and hopping onto Buckbeak. He smiled fleetingly before taking off, his absence as abrupt as his apology.

Remus greedily holds on to that sight as he goes back into his house and collapses at his table from leftover fatigue - a hard-faced Sirius waving back at him, his apology ringing in his ears. Too beautiful to be his. He doesn’t realise he’s crying into his shirtsleeves until the tears start getting tacky on his neck, and the bird tilts its head inquiringly. 

“What are you crying for? He _will_ be back, you know?” Faiz said, in the nicest voice he’d managed in the last three weeks. “He’s only a few hours away.”

Remus turned to the bird, bewildered.

“Oh - no. I’m happy. Really. Something I had always wanted just happened. I _am_ happy.”

“Humans are just confusing. I’ve got one telling me he’s not got anger issues while using stray rats as target practice and now I’ve got this one telling me he’s in paroxysms of delight while sobbing his eyes out. Well, perhaps in the meantime,” it cracked a sunflower seed in its beak. 

“I can temper your infinite joy just a little by telling you that the next time you try fornicating while I am trying to have a nap, I _will_ bite, and _where_ it is will make you both wish you’d gone and poked a sleeping werewolf.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you found that as fun to read as I did to write!


End file.
